Every ramp has a loop in the floor that counts cars going down it, so the sign at the entrance knows what is on each level. At night they count one car. Down from six to five. Five to four. Four to three, two, one, ground. Then six to five again. Every forty seconds, for six hours, a car goes down the whole building and never gets to the barrier and starts again at the top.
I run the control room for a council multi storey and I read the loop counts the way other people read the news.
What the loops see.
A wire in the floor of every ramp. A car over it is a car counted, down or up by which end it crosses first. The counts feed the sign and they feed my screen, and on my screen I can watch a car go down the building as a dot moving from six to five to four.
At night the dot goes round.
Six to five. Forty seconds later, five to four. Four to three, three to two, two to one, one to the ground floor. Then the exit loop, which should be next, reads nothing, and the loop at the top, six to five, reads a car.
It does that from about midnight to six. Five hundred and forty times, most nights. The same interval, forty seconds a ramp, which is the speed you drive a ramp at when you are looking for the way out and you have not found it.
What has been checked.
The loops, every one, recalibrated and replaced in turn. The dot goes round.
The cameras on the ramps. Empty. The loops read a car on a ramp the camera shows empty, each in turn, in order, at the speed of a car.
The ground floor. I have stood on it at two in the morning, at the bottom of the last ramp, where the exit lane begins. The loop on the ramp above me read a car coming down. The ramp was empty. I felt the air move past me, the push of air a car makes, and the smell of brakes, and the exit lane to my right stayed empty and the loop at the top read a car starting down.
It comes down to the ground floor and it cannot see the exit, and it goes back up to the top to try again, and I do not know how it gets back up because the up loops never read it.
The exit.
The exit lane from the ground floor was moved in 2004. It used to be on the other side, by the stairs, and when the shopping centre was built the old exit was bricked up and a new one cut on the street side. The old exit is a wall now, painted, with a fire hose on it.
I looked at where the dot goes after the last ramp, as close as the loops can say. It goes towards the old exit. Towards the wall with the hose on it. And stops, and is at the top again.
Who.
I do not know. I have not asked the retired man this time because I think I know what he would say, and because it is not one story in this building, it is several, and they do not all get to be explained. Somebody drove in before 2004 and is looking for the way they came in, and the way is a wall.
What is done about it.
The count is wrong by one on whichever level the dot is on and the sign outside says one space fewer than there is, and the job number for it is three years old.
What I do.
I run the control room.
I have had the wall painted. Not a door. A painting of the old exit as it was, the barrier and the daylight and the street beyond it, done by a woman the council uses for hoardings, from a photograph the retired man had. It took her a week and the council paid for it as public art, which it is.
The dot still goes round. But it does something new at the bottom now. It goes towards the wall, and it stops there, and it stays. A minute. Two. The loop at the top does not read a car. Then the exit loop, the real one, on the other side of the building, reads a car, and the barrier lifts for it, and the dot is gone, and the next night it is back at the top at midnight.
It is finding it. Most nights, now. It takes a while, the painting is not the way out, but it is a picture of the way out and I think that is enough to go on, and I sit in the control room at two in the morning and watch the dot come down six floors and stop at a painted street and work it out, and when the barrier lifts I say, out loud, there you go, and I do not think I am talking to a loop.